Event ID 10016, KB 920783, and the WSS_WPG Group

If you've ever deployed Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 in a least privilege configuration, you have undoubtedly encountered errors similar to the following in your Windows event log:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} to the user TECHTOOLBOX\svc-sharepoint-dev SID (S-1-5-21-3914637029-2275272621-3670275343-1145) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

Specifically, I am referring to Event ID 10016 and 10017.

While these errors are apparently benign, it is still rather annoying to have your event logs flooded with this kind of "noise." [Personally, I very much like to see servers come up "clean" after a reboot (meaning no new errors or warnings in the event log). This is especially true when you use something like Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to monitor your servers, and one or more members of the Operations team receives notification whenever an error occurs on a Production server.]

There are lots of sources out on the Internet that provide the steps necessary to resolve these errors (essentially you need to grant the SharePoint service account Local Activation permission to the IIS WAMREG Admin Service).

This week, I was glad to discover that Microsoft has a KnowledgeBase article (KB 920783) describing the errors and the associated workaround. [This KB article appears to have been published over two years ago, but honestly, I was completely unaware of it until just yesterday when I was building out the Production MOSS 2007 environment on my latest project.]

However, I see two problems with KB 920783:

First, it doesn't mention Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 -- which might explain why I never came across this KB before when searching the Internet. Sure, we all know that MOSS 2007 is built on top of WSS v3 and thus KB articles that apply to "Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0" almost always apply to "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007", but if you don't specifically state that, you shouldn't expect Bing or Google to return the KB article when searching for something like "MOSS 10016" or "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 10016". Right?

Second, and much more important, the KB article instructs you to:

"type the domain user account that you specified as the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 service account"

I definitely don't recommend doing that -- unless you just like making more work for yourself than necessary. Instead, you should specify the local WSS_ADMIN_WPG and WSS_WPG groups rather than a specific user. This is what I've been doing for the last couple of years so trust me, it works.

The reason why I recommend using the "Windows SharePoint Services Worker Process Group" instead of individual users is that you are likely (or at least hopefully) using different service accounts for your SharePoint farm (e.g. TECHTOOLBOX\svc-sharepoint) and for the application pools behind your Web applications (e.g. TECHTOOLBOX\svc-web-fabrikam). Furthermore, if you are doing a large enterprise deployment of SharePoint, you likely have multiple Web applications (e.g. SSP, My Sites, etc.) that each utilize a separate service account.

Rather than granting the Local Activation permission to each of these service accounts individually, it is much more effective to just grant the permission to the WSS_ADMIN_WPG and WSS_WPG groups instead.

Note

When creating a new Web application, SharePoint automatically adds the corresponding service account to the local WSS_WPG group on each SharePoint server in your farm.

Update (2009-10-29)

Matt McEvoy contacted me last Monday regarding the fact that I didn't specify the WSS_ADMIN_WPG group -- only the WSS_WPG group.

Ugh...that will teach me to try to recall something like this from memory. When I was writing this blog post, I mistakenly thought that the service account for the SharePoint farm was added to both WSS_ADMIN_WPG and WSS_WPG. However, this isn't the case.

Therefore you need to be sure to apply the steps in KB 920783 using both groups if you want to rid your event logs of these errors once and for all. Again, this is assuming you are using least privilege accounts -- which I certainly hope you are.

Thanks, Matt, for pointing out my omission.

Update (2010-05-03)

If performing this step on Windows Server 2008 R2, you must first take ownership of the corresponding registry key and grant Administrators permissions to update the configuration.

To take allow the configuration of the IIS WAMREG Admin Service to be changed using the Component Services console:

Click the Start menu, type regedit, and then click regedit.exe. If prompted by User Account Control to allow the program to make changes to this computer, click Yes.

In the Registry Editor window, search for "61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1" to find HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID\{61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}.

Right-click on the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID\{61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} key and then click Permissions.

In the Permissions for {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} dialog box, click Advanced.

In the Advanced Security Settings for {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} dialog box:

Click the Owner tab.

In the Change owner to list, click the Administrators group.

Click OK.

In the Permissions for {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} dialog box, click the Administrators group, then click the checkbox to allow the group Full Control, and click OK.

Close the Registry Editor window.

Now that the Administrators group has sufficient permissions, follow the steps in KB 920783 to make the changes to the IIS WAMREG Admin Service.